Over 1,000 nonprofit organizations will be charged for pick-up starting July 1; some councilors want that decision reversed.

Kids enjoy the after-school program at Central Neighbourhood House. The new garbage fees amount to about a half of a part-time position a year for the non-profit, which depends on part-timers to run child and youth programs.

By:Wendy GillisStaff Reporter, Published on Wed May 02 2012

An employee for an after-school children’s program, or garbage collection?

More than 1,000 Toronto charities and non-profits are now scrambling to make decisions necessary to balance the books after learning of a city council decision to charge for garbage pick-up.

Beginning July 1, charities and non-profit groups will pay for waste collection — a motion passed by city council late last year that many organizations say they’ve only recently been informed of.

“The roll-out of this has been just awful. Organizations are now just waking up to the fact that they are facing really significant costs,” said John Campey, executive director of Social Planning Toronto.

Hardest hit, Campey said, are organizations that accept food or clothing, since they receive loads of poor-quality donations that wind up in the garbage. For those groups, costs will be between $10,000 and $20,000 once they are phased in by 2015, he said.

Adding to the sting was the fact that some charities were slapped with the news around the same time council announced the city ended 2011 with a $292 million surplus.

The surplus for the city’s solid waste management system alone was $37.2 million.

“To spend all this time fear-mongering and threatening to cut programs, then coming out with this huge surplus, it’s just not right,” said Elizabeth Forestell, executive director of Central Neighbourhood House, a charity that runs programs for poor youth, family and seniors.

The fee will tack $6,000 to $10,000 on to Forestell’s expenses. It’s not a fatal blow, she said, but it’s the equivalent of half of a part-time staffer, many of whom run the charity’s after-school programs.

“It could literally put some food banks out of businesses,” Gail Nyberg, executive director of the Daily Bread Food Bank, said of the fee. Her group won’t be badly hit — it already pays for garbage collection, she said — but Nyberg worries for smaller food banks, such as Churches by the Bluffs in Scarborough.

The estimated $1,600 per year that food bank will have to pay is the equivalent of two months of its weekly meal program, said program director Gail Barkic.

When the garbage fee hike came before city council in November, Mike Layton, councillor for Trinity-Spadina, moved to exempt some charities, but it failed 21-20. He now plans to bring the issue before the next public works meeting.

“There’s better ways of expanding the recycling franchise to these organizations than initiating a fee, because in some cases, this could have disastrous impacts on their budget,” he said.

She thinks charities should go through the same process to help reduce the city’s garbage collection costs, instead of instituting a new fee.

“So many (fees) got brought in, including the field fees, that were just put forward in order to make as many cuts as possible,” she said. “Quite a few things got caught in the net that maybe shouldn’t have been. I think this is one of them.”

The decision was made “at a time when Mayor Ford’s dominance on city council was still strong and intact,” said Joe Mihevc (Ward 21, St. Paul’s). “Since then, I think a number of folks have been doing a re-think on this.” he said.

But Don Valley West Councillor John Parker said he isn’t convinced it should be repealed.

“I’m not sure that we’ve worked it all through, and I’m not sure to what degree it needs to be a concern. Right now, I need more information,” he said.

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